1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments disclosed herein generally relate to the use of a network to support clients of a service who use devices provided by a service company or their own company. The embodiments are more particularly related to a management device for automatically determining a method to extract information of interest from one or more network devices using a plurality of communication protocols.
2. Discussion of the Background
Today, many companies support devices at a client site remotely. In order to remotely monitor the devices, the devices either send messages to a monitoring station or are monitored using a communication protocol such as the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). One issue of monitoring the devices, however, is how to handle devices from different vendors. This issue arises because the values obtained by SNMP are generally different from vendor to vendor. Moreover, MIB support within even the same vendor may vary widely. In addition, SNMP allows for the use of private Management Information Bases (MIBs), in addition to standard MIBs. However, the meanings of the private MIBs frequently are not readily available. Further, in many cases, a hardware vendor decides not to support private MIB's from other vendors.
Further, many existing remote support systems address the data collection aspect of the remote support systems. Such systems are interested in how to transfer various data from the devices in the field to the monitoring devices. In many cases, however, the actual data collection is not flexible and lacks the capability to self-adjust to newer devices connected to the network.
At the present time, many remote support systems deterministically support the devices in the field or require human intervention to update the remote support systems in order to support a multi-vendor environment. These remote support systems tend to respond to the incoming information according to a preprogrammed fashion instead of adapting to the dynamically changing devices and network environment.
Thus, there exists an unmet need in the art for a remote support system including multi-vendor devices to accommodate decision-making and a flexible response according to the dynamically changing devices and network environment.